Two hours later we were skirting the southern edge of Memphis in the Cadillac, Will driving like a crazy man, running stop signs, a beer clenched between his thighs. A terrifying driver, he seemed to feel obliged to tempt fate every time he got behind the wheel. Later in life he would have a driver, which is the only reason he’s alive today.
After dinner he had changed into black jeans, a black turtleneck and pointed black boots. He then opened a locked drawer in his desk, from which he extracted another paper bag filled with wadded-up currency—singles, fives, tens and twenties. “I’ve got more, about ten thousand buried out back,” he said, stuffing bills into his pockets, “and way more than that down in Mississippi.”
“From what?”
“You’ll see.”
In the car, Will talked of Cheryl and her virtues while I clutched the dashboard in preparation for disaster. “Man, can you believe Elbridge,” Will asked in a tone of stunned admiration. “Lucky bastard.”
We finally came to rest in front of a squat cinder-block bunker on a block of derelict frame houses. A brilliant mural in pink and black depicted flamingos—as stylized as the totem animals of a cave painting—high stepping to the notes of a stick-figure band. The sign over the door identified the place as THE HOT SPOTTE. A huge black man in an electric-blue sharkskin suit guarded the door. After a moment he recognized Will, who shook his hand and shouted a greeting above the din.
Inside, the establishment seemed to be on fire. From what I could see through the thick smoke, the bar was lined with black men in hats who looked us over skeptically. Two couples danced to the music from the jukebox; after three months as Will’s roommate, I recognized the voice of Jackie Wilson.
I’d never seen the inside of a bar before; if I’d been suddenly, inexplicably transported to the Elks Lodge in Des Moines, Iowa, I would have felt a frisson of exotic danger. But this was like standing on the thundering lip of Victoria Falls, teetering above the steamy abyss. The walls were covered in red shag carpet, and the patrons were dressed with a meticulous flamboyance that made me feel distinctly underdressed. Will had disappeared. I tried to find a posture that would seem natural and fixed my attention on a tiny stage where three musicians were setting up their equipment. Painted on the bass drum was the legend LESTER HOLMES & THE SOULFULS. When Will finally returned, he was holding two beers and a ratty cigarette. He handed me one of the beers and lit the cigarette as a fourth man with tight glistening curls and a sequined jacket hopped up on the stage to scattered applause.
Will handed me the cigarette. When I reminded him I didn’t smoke he shouted, “It’s grass.” Had I been anywhere else I would have declined, or argued, but instead I inhaled the weedy smoke, perhaps sensing that it might make me feel less out of place, eager for any ritual that would ease my profound discomfort.
“Lester’s going to be as big as James Brown if I have anything to say about it,” Will shouted. I nodded vigorously as if this were my firm conviction, too, and took another drag; minutes passed, it seemed, before I suddenly examined the statement and found it improbable. Then in another moment it seemed the most reasonable assertion in the world, and when Lester began to play I decided he was indeed the greatest singer and guitar player I’d ever heard. The music entered my body and took over my heartbeat and respiration. I felt as if I were somehow participating in its creation, sensed that every brain stem in the room was synchronized to this powerful rhythm, all of us part of a single nervous system. Lester and the band were the nucleus, and we were all orbiting electrons.
“Lester’s drawing blood from that guitar,” Will said, accenting the first syllable in the Deep South manner. The audience talked back, exhorting him to Say it and Sing it. I found it hard to take my eyes off him, his sinuous moves inducing a kind of hypnotic rapture. A woman bobbing in front of the stage kept calling out, “Ride my alley, Lester.”
Between songs, another fan called out, “You fast, Lester.”
“Lightning would be faster,” he growled into the mike, “ ’cept it zags.”
I’ve always been a highly self-conscious person, but that night was one of the few times in my life I experienced a warm dissolution into a pool of collective consciousness; it provided me with a sympathetic point of reference for the strange fervor that’s driven Will for thirty years, and has enabled me to see the continuity in his quest from juke joints to private-jet debauches, from shooting galleries to Zen monasteries. Briefly, I think, I got it. Somehow connected to everything, I felt liberated from the narrow box of my own small existence. And if the exhilaration of that moment faded with the night, I can recall the force of it still. It was like the rocket transport of sex, like emerging from Plato’s cave into the brilliant sunlight of life itself.
Suddenly we were helping the band load equipment into an ancient pickup truck. Then quite naturally we found ourselves in the front room of a small frame house. Just like that. I thought this a wonderful way to move around the planet, eliding and deleting the boring intervals of transport, zapping from one high point to the next. When I later tried to explain this feeling to Will he nodded approvingly, holding his hair back from his face as he did so: “You segue from one hit to the next, without commercial interruption.”
I was straining to hear Lester’s bass player above the din: “I use to play spiritual,” he shouted, “but I had to quit. You can’t play the blues on Saturday night and go to church Sunday and sing God’s music. You gots to be pure. Your heart gots to be pure. The preacher he say to me—‘I know what you was doing last night and it ain’ right. You got to do one or t’other.’ So now I jes’ play these nasty old blues.”
The new venue was not nearly large enough to contain all of us, though it did, as if its plywood and tar-paper skin were infinitely elastic. Everyone danced to the music from the record player, including several small children and a white-haired relic with gold teeth. The floor throbbed beneath our feet, rough planks showing between odd sheets of brown speckled linoleum. If anyone thought I looked ridiculous they were polite enough to keep it to themselves.
The women made a show of fighting one another to dance with us. Will graciously declined these invitations. He did not dance, he just swayed. For all his apparent ease, and his intoxication, he maintained a habitual remoteness. Spending much of his life among black people, he preserved his dignity and possibly his life by never pretending to be anything but a white man. He seemed to belong, but not by virtue of aping the behavior of the local populace, nor of a moist heartiness. I was just the opposite, slapping backs and attempting to reproduce the moves of those around me. A few hours before I’d been sucking up to the plantation owner and studying his manners; now I wanted to have soul. Set me down on the street with a one-legged man, Will once said of me, and I’ll be limping inside of a block.
Under the benign influence of cannabis, I felt I could do no wrong, and the funky, foreign smell of all those bodies packed together seemed a powerful intoxicant in itself. I’d been dancing with a girl named Belinda, who kept ignoring the tall interloper with a keloid scar across his chin who tried to claim her after the first dance. Refusing to look at me, he tugged on her shoulder and hissed until she finally slapped his hand away and told him to leave her alone. When the tempo dropped with the opening notes of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” I reached out to embrace my partner for a slow dance. She grabbed me and pressed me into the soft wilderness of her breasts while thrusting the hard ridge of her pelvis into mine.
When I was suddenly, violently dislodged from this refuge, I could not understand by what agency, until I saw the skinny, shiny-faced man with one hand wrapped around Belindas neck and the other pointing a knife at me. He said, “How you like to get stuck, white boy?”
Even before I had time to be afraid Lester Holmes had grabbed him from behind and shaken the knife from his hand. “This boy’s a guest in my house,” he said, cuffing the attacker with an open hand. “He don’t know nothing. Just a dumb little shit. If you can’t h
old on to your woman, that ain’t no doing of his.”
“I ain’t his woman,” shouted Belinda, who had retreated out of reach. Returning to the fray, she reached over and punched the captive in the face.
Lester escorted the man out and the music resumed, but without me. If I’d felt like a dreamily detached spectator at my own near evisceration a moment before, I was now scared straight. I saw Will standing in the corner, conferring languidly with Ronald, Lester’s bass player. As I approached, Will tipped his beer bottle illustratively at me. “These Yankees come down here, Ronald, don’t know how to behave themselves, messing around with some other cat’s woman, getting in knife fights and all.”
The bass player smiled broadly, nodding his head up and down. And I was stung, because it occurred to me that Will possibly had more in common with this Negro musician twice his age than he did with me. Though I’d just been forced to acknowledge that I was a white boy in a room full of coloreds, I’d thought I had at least one natural ally in the room. Now I was not so sure. Maybe I was all alone. Maybe Will didn’t even like me. Maybe no one could ever understand anyone else, all of us trapped forever alone in our own hard skulls …
I was stoned, my addled and unfamiliar mind making sharp turns, unnatural leaps. Seeing my distress, Will punched my shoulder. “We just might make a hipster out of you yet.”
“So why aren’t you dancing?” I said, wanting to question his own credentials.
“I don’t dance,” he said emphatically, the way a Baptist might declare that he didn’t drink.
“That’s true,” Ronald agreed. “He don’t.” His tone seemed to indicate that he regarded this as an impressive if bizarre achievement.
“I might dance,” Will said. He stroked his hair away from his forehead thoughtfully. “If that little girl over there in the door would dance with me, I just might.”
Ronald laughed mirthlessly through his nose. “Shit, boy. You ought’er just said Ann-Margret. Fact, you got a way better shot at her. That’s Lester’s niece Taleesha. Lester don’t let nobody near her. A little princess, that girl. Her daddy’s a big nigger in town, own a couple funeral parlors. And her mama was Lula James, the blues singer.”
“No shit?” Will’s interest was if anything redoubled. “Whatever happened to her?”
“Tha’s a good question. She done married this funeral parlor gentleman, and he made her give up the music, get respectable you might say. Well, she had a baby, that you’re looking at right now, and a couple more, but I guess she couldn’t stay respectable and finally she just up and left and ain’t nobody seen her from that day to this.”
I’d noticed the girl in question, slouched against the wall, looking on but not partaking of the festivities, perhaps the only person in the place besides Will who hadn’t danced. I couldn’t judge her age. Though she was at least my height she had the awkward posture and the uncertain gestures of a brand-new adolescent, of someone unused to new limbs. Her elongated and delicate features seemed suggestive of ancient Egypt. Motionless, she was a serene statue presiding over the Dionysian frenzy. Then, thrusting a sharp elbow into the air, she stuck a finger in her nose and probed, finally removing it to inspect her findings. Observing this secret bit of grooming from across the room, Will and Ronald hooted with laughter.
Looking back, I think it was this memory that in later years gave me the confidence to live up to Taleesha’s assumption that I was an elder statesman, immune from the violent tides of blood and passion, though she was only a few months younger, and somehow always made me feel a little like a foolish boy.
“How old is she,” Will asked.
“Old enough to nasty,” I said with the false bravado of a virgin.
“I done told you, man, Lester don’t let nobody mess with his niece, man.”
“We’ll just see about that,” said Will, staring intently. And I realized then that he was extremely stoned. With Will, it was hard to tell; for all the massive quantities of stimulants and depressants he ingested, you had to know the signs: long pauses and ellipses, and, in this case, a certain glazed concentration. Suddenly the girl looked our way. She rose out of her slouch, stiffening as if for battle, and sneered at us before turning away.
A body detached itself from the rhythmic mass and crashed into me. The man apologized profusely, exhibiting the thorough and decorous contrition of the happy drunk. I was exhausted and eager to leave. “If you’re gonna ask then ask her already.”
Ronald smiled, showing an irregular row of brown teeth. “I got a dollar says no way.”
“I’ll take it,” said Will. He finished his beer, stroked his hair back with both hands and started over with a determined stride that carried just the hint of a waddle. Years later, when he became very large, I realized he had finally grown into that walk—the confident fleshy march of a man on whom cars and planes and bankers wait—as if his body had known all along its eventual shape.
The girl stiffened and seemed to grow taller and sterner and older as he said whatever he was saying. At one point she spoke. I was just about to turn my attention elsewhere when she slapped him. It was so quick and unexpected I wondered if I’d imagined it. Will stood there, nodding his head. Then he bowed slightly from the waist and retreated.
Ronald was slapping his thigh. He pocketed his dollar and told Will he’d better leave before Lester returned from out back.
“I’m not worried about Lester,” Will said, and he probably wasn’t. “But my friend here’s tired.”
We breaststroked our way through the humid murk. Belinda caught up to me on the porch and tried to convince me to stay, or to take her wherever we were going. She kissed me wetly and ran her hand between my legs, but Will was revving the car and in the end I was a little afraid—of her, of sex, of the mysterious chasm of race. I told her, improbably, that I’d come back for her tomorrow and jumped in the car.
We peeled out, spitting gravel back across the lot, and raced away with the windows wide open.
“That was wild,” I howled over the rush of the cool air.
Will nodded. He was silent, withdrawn.
Finally I shouted, “What the hell did you say to that girl, anyway?”
He kept driving as if he hadn’t heard me, and it would be years before I heard the punch line.
IV
Late at night, there are two kinds of errant sons—those, like me, who try to sneak in quietly, and those who defiantly jam the brakes and slam the doors as if to insist they’ll never stoop to stealth. Will was the latter. He slammed the car door twice for good measure, possibly in the hope that the sound would carry up the hill to the little house where the lights were glowing ominously.
It seemed as if I’d just finished undressing and fallen backward onto the bed when I was startled bolt upright by a pounding on the door of my room and a series of shrill squawks. Finally I recognized Mr. Savage’s voice between the duck calls. “Rise and shine. Coffee’s on the stove and the ducks are on the water.”
It was still pitch dark when we piled into the station wagon. Elbridge rode shotgun, while Will and I collapsed groggily in the backseat with Beauregard the lab, who was as excited as Will was sullen.
The external world seemed incredibly strange: the cold morning air freighted with smells of leaf decay and wet dog fur, the cinematic flashes of landscape scooped up fleetingly in the cone of the headlights. Drunk and stoned, within minutes I fell asleep.
Later, I was prodded awake by Will and presently found myself on the edge of a dock, looking out into the blackness. At Mr. Savage’s instigation, I stepped uncertainly down into the varnished ribs of a boat that resembled a large canoe with a flat stern. Our guide—a silent, camouflaged figure—huddled over what looked like a lawn-mower engine.
Will’s father sat beside me as we spluttered across the water, Will and Elbridge following in a second boat. Now and again, like a wading giant, a dark cypress would loom up out of the oblivion. “This was all dry land here,” Cordell announced over the
gurgle of the engine, “and then round about 1811 there was an earthquake, maybe the most violent earthquake on this continent ever. Felt the tremors all the way to Boston and New Orleans. At the time this was the hunting grounds of the Chickasaws. A clubfooted chief named Reelfoot was their top dog, and according to legend he stole a Choctaw princess for his wife, whereupon the Great Spirit stamped his giant hoof, crushing the old clubfoot and creating this lake.” He laughed. “Or so they say. There was a white settlement across the river called New Madrid, and when that earthquake hit they figured it was Judgment Day for sure. The earth rolled like a storm sea and belched out sulfur and smoke. Darkness fell for a week. Right out of the Book of Revelation—all fire and brimstone and sulfurous stink.”
He was interrupted by a thump on the bottom of the boat as the stern rose and fell over an obstruction in the water.
“Cypress knee,” he said. “And there’s still stumps from the forest that was here before the quake. The land downstream rose up and the land here dropped fifty feet. They say the Mississippi ran backwards for three days, which is how the lake was formed. God knows how many Indians drowned right underneath us.”
All at once I could see the dead warriors, fish nibbled and bloated in their buckskins, rising from the muddy bottom. I almost leaped out of the boat when we hit another cypress knee.
When we passed close to a rectangular blind rising on stilts out of the black water, he observed, “Plenty of white men have died since, disputing the fishing and hunting rights.” Something in the way he said it suggested that this was a different order of mortality.
Twenty minutes later I was shivering in a duck blind situated at the edge of a spongy island which was an ancient Chickasaw burial mound, clutching a 12-gauge Winchester pump. Will’s father had explained its operation, but I had no idea if, when the moment came, I would remember what to do, or if I could stand up to the kick. Cordell was still in the boat with the guide, laying out decoys. Gradually their silhouettes grew more distinct beneath a pewter sky turning pink to the east. And suddenly Will, who I thought was dozing in the corner of the blind, raised his gun to his shoulder and aimed it directly at his father’s head.
The Last of the Savages Page 4